Seeing how my mother navigated her life 30-plus years ago — and her life today — makes me optimistic about the present. I just wish it could last a little longer.
calls me one day to say “My face has fallen and it can’t get up,” we howl like a couple of hyenas. But then she tells me she’s serious; she wants a quick cosmetic fix. Theare bringing her down. “I’m a bubbly person, but these wrinkles make me look like flat Champagne,” she says. My mother is 82.together has brought us closer, even though we already live only three blocks from each other in Los Angeles. The decades-wide age gap between us now feels more like a puddle than a pond.
Before the divorce, my mom, who ate sparingly and rarely smiled with her teeth, was a caged beauty. My dad didn’t ogle her ; he belittled her. Veronica didn’t go to college, unlike my dad, and he lorded his degrees over her. If she mispronounced a word, he sneered. Case in point: Fast-forward more than three decades and I want a neck lift but I’ll settle for a serum that tightens my jowls for just an hour or so. This past October, I turned 55, and like butter left out overnight — and my jawline — those Second Wave feminist ideals have softened. I see now in the mirror what my mom probably saw when she was my age: the sag, the sun stains. I’m my mother’s daughter: I want to be a flute of crisp Veuve Clicquot too.
Veronica says that post-Teddy she got over being “moody and sensitive” in midlife and went dancing every weekend. I can still picture her at 50 or so getting ready to go out in a black leather miniskirt and heels — and applying a fake cleft to her chin with eyeliner. That image of her has made aging easier for me. My mom didn’t become invisible in midlife. She got louder, funnier, and sexier.
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